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Anticipating Problems (or, what's going on with DSAC?)

Today's entry is inspired by a recent Dilbert cartoon where the pointy-haired boss tells Dilbert that he needs to get better at anticipating problems. While we'd all like to see problems before they happen, we need a little help here, and inspiring words from the pointy-haired boss just doesn't cut it.

Today's DBAs have a lot of responsibility; arguably more than they have had in the past in terms of number of systems and the complexity of these systems. Most DBAs have implemented early detection mechanisms for production systems, but what about non-production or less-critical systems like development or test systems? These are often called "non-critical systems" until a severe issue occurs with them, and then they suddenly become critical because they are preventing new work from being implemented on schedule. Sometimes it may be difficult to justify the cost of robust monitoring software like DB2 Performance Expert, Tivoli OMEGAMON for DB2, or IBM Tivoli Monitoring for these labeled "less-critical" systems, so what's a pro-active DBA to do?One solution is the Data Studio Administration Console (DSAC) . It is a no-charge offering with your data server license that supports DB2 for z/OS and DB2 for Linux, UNIX, and Windows with an "at-a-glance" view to see the health and availability of these systems. It is not a full-blown performance monitor, but it does show several key indicators like whether the system is up/down, locking rates, resource utilization, etc.

In new news, although DSAC used to be the delivery vehicle for the Q Replication Dashboard, we have just made available a new and improved Q Replication Dashboard One of our Gold Consultants, Frank Fillmore, will be discussing this dashboard in a webcast (two sessions to accommodate different timezones) with IBM on September 15. Get the details from his blog.

With this change, you might be asking what other changes are in store for DSAC? You may have heard us talking about our next generation performance manager. It has a new architecture along with a web browser interface that will support DB2 and eventually other DBMSs. Once we roll out this performance manager (be sure to attend IOD to find out more), we plan to use this new architecture for the next release of DSAC. It will still provide the same high-level health and availability capabilities that DSAC 1.2 provides today, but the Web user interface will be refreshed and have consistency with our other Web UI offerings.

So, don't let the pointy-haired boss get you down the next time they ask you to anticipate problems better -- just smile, thank them for their leadership, and go take a look at DSAC to prevent those critical situations.--Bryan Smith